Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Vadim Cherny" <VadimCherny AT mail.ru>]

> > > > Continuous or repetitive? How many times, in your Gen2 examples, the 
> > > > earth was watered? ...
> > >
> > > Continuously, every day.
> >
> > Every day? At any rate, no more than one day. Then the earth became 
> > watered, and the action became inessential. ...
>
> Until the sun shone, the ground dried up, and the trees in the garden 
> started to wither. Hey, surely that can happen even in Russia in summer, 
> if you don't water a garden or park at least every few days.

Peter, you attempt to slip out. The text contains no implication of the 
continuous action whatsoever. By such means as yours, anything is 
continuous. You even have to declare Joram's wounding by Arameans 
continuous.

> > > Not true. I deny that English "would" is future-related.
> >
> > Look at its etymology, then.
>
> Its etymology, like that of "will", is a verb meaning "want", as in "he 
> willed it to happen" - the remaining rare use of "will" as an independent 
> verb has a regularised morphology but certainly the same origin.

Nope. "Want" produced "will," and "will" produced "would."

> Anyway, etymology is largely irrelevant to current meaning.

Sure enough. And narrators employing ci-yiqtol did not dwell into its 
etymological future tense. What matters, however, that yiqtol or "will," by 
default, means future tense, and should be translated thus - unless we see 
idiom or deictic shift. And there is nothing enigmatic about yiqtols - they 
are future tense verbs, with some idiomatic usage derived from their future 
tense meaning, and some cases of deictic shift. Note that deictic shifts and 
idioms are expectedly unusually common in emphatic decidedly archaic 
narration like than in Tanakh.

Vadim Cherny